Today I Recommend
by Nerumi H
Summary: "Is this your first time here, Rapunzel?" he asks, testing out the bizarre name. She nods animatedly, pairing it with a sheepish smile. "How could you tell?" "Normally people don't make those kinds of eyes at frapps." /BARISTA AU.


.title.: **Today I Recommend...**

.summary.: **"Is this your first time here, Rapunzel?" he asks, elbows on the counter, testing out the bizarre name. She nods animatedly once again, pairing it with a sheepish smile. "How could you tell?" "Normally people don't make those kinds of eyes at frapps."**

.prompt.: **Barista Jack takes the order of a particularly stunning blonde (or brunette, feel free to decide!) who goes by the name of … "…Rapunzel? Riiiight. Suuure. And how would you spell that?"**

.prompt by.: **Justine / completelytwitterpated on tumblr**

.universe.: **Modern AU**

.a/n.: **My favourite prompt work I've done so far, and nearly favourite for Jackunzel. I figured it was long enough and good enough to deserve an upload on its own!**

**X**

"Jack, get off the counter."

The boy in question doesn't even look up, but instead swings his feet up on the surface too. It's not like he's in view of the door or anything. He's just innocently on the order side of the counter, drinking what has practically turned out to be just a cup of whipped cream. And grinning at the redhead who had given him the order.

"I'm on break. I no longer belong to your rules," he says, scraping the pilfered pastry fork along the inside of the coffee cup.

Merida leans backwards on the counter where he sits. "Well, Frost, if you want to be independent so badly, you've got ten minutes until _my _break and then the dance floor's all yours." She sneers mockingly at him. He licks whipped cream off the side of his thumb with a shrug in her direction, and her reply is a wrinkle of her nose and: "How can you even eat that?"

He says melodramatically, "This why you shouldn't be working here. You don't even appreciate the pure mastery that we make." Jack scoots closer to her, holding out the cup under her nose - she automatically swats at it and he eggs, "C'mon, try it. Try it, Mer, maybe if you do you'll make better coffee."

"That's just straight sugar!" she argues while they engage in a battle over the cup. Jack repeatedly stuffs it at her under she's finally buckled under giggles, but just when he thinks he won whatever they were doing she yanks him by his uniform shirt to the floor.

He's lucky to land on his feet. Finding himself faced with Merida's wide, mischievous grin, she announces to him, "Ten minutes just flies by, doesn't it? Customer. Go out there."

And then she struts to the back room, leaving Jack with a deflated container of whipped cream and a jangle of the bell over the door.

As the person enters the shop, Jack tucks away his previous fascination and leans into the alcove between the cash register and the pastry bar. He's counting on university-campus hipsters or a frazzled businesswoman or - well, _anything_ but someone who was going to make him stop and stare.

She's petite and blonde, dressed in a peachy camisole and pink dress that makes her look like she stepped from a dollhouse, mock Mary Janes and all. Her hair cascades in a blonde twist down her back, stray tendrils slipping around her heart-shaped face, the flaxen colour highlighted in sun-bleached white and honey gold. When she grins at him, her eyes gleam green and intelligent. Crafty.

Pretty, he thinks. Pretty hot.

She scampers up to the counter, flicking away her blonde hair at nearly every three steps and he has to resist an immense urge just to pull the whole lock out of its meager hold to her braid so he can see it frame her face better. Urgh. No. No, Jack. He greets, "Hey, can I help you?" and leans further on the counter.

She tucks her hair again and observes the menu above his head. She looks kind of confused. He's about to offer classic recommendations that he's been ordered by his boss to give every passing person, but then her eyebrows arch up and she points at a listing.

"Can I have a Caramel Ribbon Crunch Frappuccino?"

She pronounces the 'c's like a 'k'. He (not very) inconspicuously snorts at that but nods all the same, and tallies up the cost while she fishes a coin purse from her tan shoulder bag. After she hands him a bill, he asks as he tumbles the change into her tiny palm, "And who's this for?"

She closes her fingers over the coins and shortly shakes it as she says excitedly, "Rapunzel."

He blinks. "…Rapunzel?"

Her nod is pretty adamant for someone that small. He grabs a notepad from under the counter and clicks the pen pointedly at her.

"Rapunzel? Riiiight. Suuure. And how would you spell that?"

She giggles shortly and it's a laugh that makes him want to hear every time it's ever happened. She lists out the letters patiently as he scrawls them down, almost sure he'll pronounce it wrong if asked. The bell on the door rings again just as she finishes and is nearly bouncing on the counter to see his progress.

"Got it?" she asks.

"Got it. Take a seat." She nods again and scurries off, taking a window table and placing her bag on the table. It nearly spills open, and from it she takes a paperback book.

He snaps out of watching her just in time – Merida has to nudge him subtly to get him to do it, but he's at the machines as soon as Merida is tending to the following customer. Back in the motions of responsible employees, not those who keep shooting sideways glances at the girl at the window seat.

He decides to gives her an extra layer of whipped cream, perhaps because of his affinity to it, and strolls to the other side of the counter. He announces her name before he can even consider checking his notepad. Her head snaps up – correct? Huh - and there is a small victory in her hair finally falling completely out of the braid, draping into her book.

Mostly people will just come up and grab their things and go, but she gives him another disarming grin and takes it right from his hands. She says, "Thank you, Jackson," and after a puzzled jolt he realises he's got a nametag on. Uhm. Duh.

"Jack, actually," he corrects lightly, smirking back. She plucks a straw from the nearby rack and proceeds then to take her first sip of the drink, right here. She seems almost hypnotised by the swirls of caramel, oddly excited by the scrawling of her name on the cup. Enormous green eyes as wondrous as if he'd given her diamonds.

"Is this your first time here, Rapunzel?" he asks, elbows on the counter, testing out the bizarre name. She nods animatedly once again, pairing it with a sheepish smile.

"How could you tell?"

"Normally people don't make those kinds of eyes at frapps."

And she laughs, before precisely adjusting the straw into the towering hill of cream. He raises an eyebrow at her – and meanwhile, her expression sparkles excitement again as she swallows.

"This is really good!" she exclaims, and he dips half of a bow to the music of her laugh. "Really, really."

"And if he didn't think you were so pretty, he'd probably've spat in it." Merida's teasing voice suddenly appears at his shoulder.

Rapunzel tilts her head at the new member, treating herself to another idle sip of the drink despite the redhead's words (which may or may not be true, depending on which customer he is implied to be targeting). "It _is_ good, though."

"I know. It's one of the few things he's decent at." Merida puts her hand on Jack's shoulder, giving it a tough squeeze. Her red hair nearly makes him sneeze, all the fly-aways gravitating towards his face. "Like, for example, he's really bad at keeping at his work, yeah?"

Jack throws a mock-surprised look over his shoulder at her. "Was that supposed to be a suggestion, Mer? You might want to say it a bit more bluntly." She rolls her eyes at him, and gives a jerk of her thumb to the growing line. Ah yes. Rush hour has followed in the wake of the blonde.

"Okay, duty calls. Enjoy yourself," he tells Rapunzel before being pulled down the line of the counter by the pushy redhead – she waves at him and scampers off, a glow of gold in the sweetly scented shop, returning to her book.

Once they're back at the cashier, Jack waggles his eyebrows suggestively at Merida, and she elbows him very hard in the side.

**X**

The next time she comes, he's honestly surprised. He had not been expecting another call of the same sort, but when she comes to the counter he can grin far more confidently at her and her order comes quicker.

"One small iced caramel macchiato please!"

"Caramel again?" he asks with a smirk, and she just won't stop smiling. Also, she pronounced it right this time. "You know there are other things."

"Be patient." She smirks and extracts her purse, cash ready. "I'll get to them eventually."

"Does this mean you'll be back?"

She points over her shoulder to the window. "My college is just down the street. I went there for art and I love it and all, but the lectures can get kind of tiring, you know?"

He snorts, taking the money from her. He doesn't even count it before shifting it into the register. Same amount of change as last time, poured into her delicate little fingers. "Are you skipping classes for me?"

"For the _coffee,"_ Rapunzel emphasizes, then shakes her head wildly at the accusation that still permeates the conversation because of his very teasing gaze. "And no, I don't skip!"

"You're giving me two very different messages there," he says, and retreats from the counter backwards to reach the machines. "So, when did you start classes?"

"A few months ago," she says, bending into the counter to keep better watch on him. "Do you not go to school?"

He laughs hastily, holding up his palms to her. "No, no, no, don't bring that up. Besides, I work this apron better than I do textbooks."

She giggles in return, lowering her head to give him a view of how her hair is still in a braid, but it's neater. No curling tendrils today. Her sweeping bangs are fastened back with a headband whose lavender fabric is patterned in thin diamonds across her crown. She keeps touching at it, like to check she hasn't lost it. "That's probably true, Jack."

He flicks his thumbs under the straps at his shoulders, gleaning another breezy laugh. Among the ambient lowlights and heady coffee aroma that only succeeds in making him lethargic during his long shifts, she manages to focus all the sunlight on her, as if it comes from her form instead. He files through the shots of this and that until the narrow cup is full, and then he's gotten to the caramel.

He looks back at her, and she's regarding the pastries in fascinated curiosity. The headband is lined in silver, diamond per diamond, flowers out of lace shrinking into the thick waves of her hair.

He's not too bad of an artist, or so he likes to tell himself. He's sufficient with the endlessness of sand-on-glass murals, and he'd be lying if he didn't throw one or two doodles into Hiccup's coffee whenever he came here to hang on Merida's arm. But Rapunzel's got him intimidated – art student and gorgeous, so he plays it safe and draws out the shapes from her headband into the surface of the whipped cream.

When he hands it to her, calling out her name even though she's the only customer on their feet, she looks at it and is quick to notice the flower. She points at it a little too quickly – a dab of whipped cream sticks to the tip of her finger, yet luckily doesn't obstruct the image.

"That's my headband pattern!"

"Yeah. It's nothing." He smirks at her, shrugging. "You should wear some hat like they do in England next time. Really give me a challenge."

"I just might," she smiles back over the rim of the cup, and then it's just her emerald eyes left to focus on him as she takes a taste. They softly flutter closed as she swallows, and it would all be a lot more distracting if she didn't end up with caramel all over her nose.

**X**

Iced Cinnamon Dolce Latte. He thinks she may be finding the hardest ones to say and getting those for a fun culture dip.

Today she's got her hair in a low side-swept ponytail, but it still falls all the way to her waist, and over the register when she speaks to him. He's got to stop being distracted by it. Well, it's either her hair, or her stunning eyes, or her innocuous slips of cleavage, so, well, he's limited when standing behind a counter.

After a short catch-up on the day like awkward friends, he notices she has her usual bag, but there's something different inside of it at least from what he's seen. A notebook with a thick spine is pushing away the cover of it, light sunny spine smattered in paint.

"Is that for your class?" he asks, giving the notebook a nod of his head. She lifts the pack like she's surprised to see it's there, and answers in the merry affirmative.

"Can I look at it?"

"I don't see why not," Rapunzel says, and is halfway complete the unearthing of that book when he feels the spark of her smirk on him. "Other than the fact that you haven't started my order yet."

He tsks a few times and retreats from the counter, reaching blindly for the plastic glasses. "I still want to look at it."

"Can you come sit with me then?" Sounding curious, she pushes her palms against the surface separating them, and as a student, he doubts she ever worked much in a place like this. "Can you leave the counter at all?"

"If I call Merida in from whatever date she's on, yeah." Jack tilts the cup at her like he's just gotten a great idea. "Or I can just jump over it."

She giggles, the book sliding back into her bag.

Art student. He knew that from the start, but now that her works are so close underneath his fingertips, he wants to try and impress her. Or at least get close to impressing her. Perhaps it's a risky impulse for him to have.

Pretty girls make him do dumb things, he soon realises.

In the frozen drink, he manages a vague design. She takes the cup from him; she peers into the toppings, and he certainly doesn't miss her eagerness for what he's tried to replicate today.

He knows it's supposed to be the music staff across the back of her sweater, but apparently she doesn't. Okay, cinnamon is a lot harder to orchestrate in such a narrow canvas.

She tilts her head, laughing awkwardly and spinning the cup through both her palms. "I'm so, so sorry - Can I get a translation?"

So, well, now he's embarrassed. Smooth moves there, Frost. Congratulations on sucking. He chuckles back wryly, settling on his heels in an angle away from her. "Never mind."

"No, please tell me? Is it just upside down? I'm holding it upside down – "

"Hah, okay, no, no. It's something secret." He bares his teeth at her mockingly. "You distracted me while I was making it and now you'll never find out what it is."

She lowers the cup, tucking back her hair again with a stray hand. How can fingers be quite that fascinating? Her emerald eyes flicker a mischievousness he had expected early on for her to have, but the crafty effect splinters quickly when she giggles girlishly. "How did I distract you?"

"Maybe you'll get the answer to that later."

She fires him a grin to the side as she fishes for a straw, obviously having learned from her previous error with the drinks and Jack's tendency for overladen whipped cream. Despite his error she still asks, "Do you do this for everyone?" while she gathers the art-less frame of whipped cream with her straw and putting it to her tongue.

He lets her receive his smile in place of an answer, just to see what she'll make of it. It's a grin that next shines on him and he supposes she guessed right. Without a glance to the passer-by/potential customers, nor the people already seated, Jack hoists himself over the partition and follows her to her typical window seat.

"I don't know how good they really are," she says modestly, wriggling into a comfortable position in her chair while Jack just lounges, lanky legs in the aisle. Her fingers hesitate on the light orange cover, tapping minutely in contemplation.

"You're an art student. Aren't they _supposed _to be good?" he says. He can guess she's got talent - maybe he can just feel it off of her (even though he definitely doesn't consider himself enough of an artist to have a sixth sense for that stuff). But that's also a proven fact to convince her. He wants to see what she's done just out of sickening curiosity and fascination over what enthralls her.

Finally Rapunzel gives a breeze of a sigh and opens the book, spinning it to him across the table. Jack immediately pounces on it – even if concealing interest is something he often tries to do - and as his ice-blue eyes bore into the pages, she brings the straw to her lips and pinches it nervously between her teeth.

"Wow," he breathes involuntarily, turning pages, regarding her sketches and colours and imagination spilled out without reins to the blankness. Each paper is filled to the margins with details, colours as vibrant and organic as that which comes from prisms, graphite portraits which look like old movie stills. "Wow. Hell. You're really amazing, do you know that?"

Rapunzel gives a happy little squirm at his words. "You think so?" she asks, her glossy lips arching in a grin over her cup. The whipped cream has begun to melt, bringing the cinnamon with it. He frowns at it - well, frowns mentally, because currently she's got him too caught in a smile to match her own.

"Yeah, I'm serious!" He flicks through a few more portraits - they look like they've been done here, of customers too bent over their laptops or reports to notice that they're being eternalized so flawlessly. "You should sell these or something. I mean, cute girl, amazing work, you'll be rich." He keeps observing until he realizes it's becoming a search. She notices.

"If you're looking for yourself, you're not in there," Rapunzel says, placing her hand on the remaining blank pages.

He smirks at her with an imploring tilt of his head, drawling a "Yet?"

Rapunzel slides the book back to herself, closing off her answer with a pointed swirl of the frozen drink and touching the straw to her lips. She opens a blank page, taps it a few times thoughtfully, her lips pursing gently to frame the sing-song of her reply, "Maybe."

**X**

It's later on the shift, once Merida has come in and he's long been sheltered behind the counter because of traffic. Rapunzel is still there, having only come back to the cashier for a long-awaited purchase of one of those pastries she'd been always looking at like she could teleport them out of the glass, and Merida is very vocal on how she can see him watching her.

Well, what is he supposed to do? She keeps waving at him, anyways. And in that window seat, she's promptly awash in light like she's some fricking angel from heaven, casually, like making him stare is no big deal at all.

She's drawing, the reason she, a dozen minutes ago, shouldered off his approach for more interrogation. She never struck him as someone to entirely shut down conversation, but he could tell she was in immense concentration, so he just stayed here and contemplated his own cinnamon fiasco.

Back in the present, Merida's wild head of hair is nearly obstructing Jack's view as she prepares someone else's generic drink. Still sinking from the nerve high of Rapunzel being Rapunzel, Jack scampers up to his friend and pulls quickly on her hair to get her attention.

"Oi! – Jack, _what?"_ She goes from snapping to just plain snappy in a single word. Rubbing absently at her head, she asks, "What do you want?"

"Your boyfriend."

"Why?"

"Because I want to run some things past him and you're too honest."

Merida looks at his earnest face, then her blue eyes drift to where Rapunzel is seated. She groans, "If they're pick-up lines again, I swear to god – "

"No! No."

"He's not gonna be any good at giving you tips to impress her."

"I don't need _tips,"_ Jack responds in a drawl, and Merida cocks a ginger eyebrow his way. He can hear her sardonic comment before she dares say it - "You're kidding me, right? Tell me you're kidding."

"I'm not," he insists. "Now call Hiccup over. He doesn't have classes right now, right?"

"None he won't skip for your sake," Merida says in a voice absolutely caked with sarcasm. Jack grins and ruffles her already-missed hair.

"Thanks, Mer!"

She swats him off as a 'you're welcome'; he looks up to see Rapunzel doing the same across the room. She gives him a little wave, the graphite pausing in her other hand like it's floating. She looks so delicate with everything, but he can tell when she laughs like she did earlier that she's just abound with energy.

Merida practically has to push him to the cash register to snap him out of it.

**X**

And against all his assumptions, she goes ahead and orders a plain latte today. Her absence of the quirky drinks that added to her cuteness can be made up for by the fact that he now thinks he knows what he's doing – spending the evening at Hiccup's espresso machine messing around with bad art couldn't go to waste.

"Why so boring today?" he asks. She empties her coin purse on the counter, sliding around the appropriate fare.

She glances up from the money, and although her head is tilted too far down for him to clearly see her smirk, he knows it's there from the glint of her eyes. "Someone mentioned something to me."

He opens his mouth to reply but finds nothing there. Well, that isn't suspicious.

"Coming right up, m'lady. Take a seat," he says instead, bowing away from the counter. When she hesitates, he gestures at the chairs again. "I might take a sec."

"Non-iced things aren't your forte?" she teases, and he gives her a modest half-smile. As he finally takes his eyes off of her to ready her order, he hears her footsteps circle around the pastry bar, hesitate around the pick-up station, then skip off to her usual seat.

And then the scraping of a chair as she tugs it over.

He glances up from where he's pouring through the steam, and she scoots the seat as close as she can to him with the barrier blocking them, and a sunny smile on her face. She folds her arms on the counter, regarding eagerly, and he has to suspect that she knows what he was planning on doing with her order. Not spit in it, for one.

"Am I just a free show to you?" he asks her, and when she laughs he snatches up one of the cleaning rags and makes quite a demonstration of cracking it against his thigh, getting her to drop her face into her hands in a fit of giggles. He tries to turn back to what he was doing – just managing to catch the mug before it overflows – but adds, "You're gonna make me nervous, Punz."

"Are you drawing something?"

"I can't answer that," he says. "Then if I screw up I can't erase it."

Rapunzel's halo of blonde flashes in his peripheral vision as she suddenly sits up straight. "I can help!"

His answer comes to him faster than expected – "Well, then come on over." He leans against the back counter as she immediately responds to it. For someone who a few days ago seemed confused over him not being completely condemned to behind the cashier, she infiltrates the space with surprising ease.

She also doesn't touch her feet to the counter at all, just hoists herself across and landing awkwardly on her knees halfway through the barrier. He chuckles and offers her a hand.

She scrambles off, making a big show of not letting her little shoes touch anything but the floor, and when she finally lands safely on his side she holds up her hands, the one still connected to his included. "Ta-da!"

"Celebrate now. Get me fired later," Jack laughs – her expression flashes concern and he hurriedly waves off his words (he's lucky enough to have her back here). Instead, he nudges the mug along the surface in her direction. She's suddenly snatched up a handful of the little cream pots, and she sets them in a neat little row on the counter.

He gets a swizzle stick and she pours in the cream once he gives her the okay with a nod. It dilutes across the dark surface like a summery cloud, fading under the surface as he waits too long.

She seems to think he's waiting too long also.

Rapunzel nearly thieves the stick from him but his surprised grip causes her to just take his fingers and lead the instrument across the surface of the coffee, drawing the cream around like spider webs. She releases and he continues – she was obviously starting something, the vague shadow of which looks like a simple fluffed tree.

He tries to etch in branches but finds it harder than he expected – he and Hiccup had only practiced a few times on these, and it wasn't exactly with the most mature sorts of drawings. He hadn't thought this would happen. But now here she is, tiny and throwing back her hair so it doesn't drape in the coffee, another stick in her hand and her lips slightly parted as she plucks and sketches through the surface of cream.

He catches himself just _watching,_ the little darts of her fingers as they orchestrate the developing drawing right before his eyes. Jack cracks open another package and trickles a few drops of the cream into a corner of the mug, and she giggles as he pointedly shimmies in closer to her so they can share the canvas at once.

He manages a simple-enough sun, thin strings of ivory reaching to her drawing, right as things start to blur because of gravity and general poor quality. Before it's beyond saving in the form of a filmy, stretched cloud across the beige latte, she turns a ray of his sun into a little bird.

They both lean back, and Jack is quick to push that one away and fill up another cup. She blinks at it, and makes a move for her bag like she's going to pay again.

"Nope. If you wanna show me up, then do it in your own damn arena," he says, smirking.

"I think we should do this one together again." Rapunzel insists this quite verbally, pushing the mug to the middle of them and moving with it until they're squeezed in tight, leaning against the counter. He slouches down a bit more to her level, finding her smile disarmingly close. And then she pours in the surface of smoke; he's urged into an action that doesn't let him miss the sight of smile all that much, since he can feel her free fingers walking up and down the back of his hand.

She pounces on it first, hurriedly sketching out a tulip, in which he finds difficulty in transforming to a cartoon rabbit head, and she makes into a mouse, and then cat, and then Rapunzel takes over and turns into a wild machine that somehow, after what only seems like a flash of gestures, creates a thatched Eiffel tower.

He exclaims, "What the heck!" and she laughs, nudging him jokingly in return. He adds another cup of cream and sticks his tongue out at her while turning it into a solid-coloured castle. She adds more spires and a balcony, until finally it's melted away again thanks to his talentlessly thin lattes.

So he just churns out another, shoving away the previous, praying no one else will come in, and she's once again got first bid – a streak of undulating bubbles like under the sea, then his: a blur of waves on the surface, then back to her: a decorative-looking leaf. Finally, he adds a little pair of arms and legs because he's run out of ideas. Her giggling makes her next effort at representation terribly shaky, and he can't even tell what it is – he's more looking at their hands resting beside the mug, where she's delicately slipping her fingers through the gaps in his.

And then she notices him looking and draws her fingers away, instead using them to prop up her chin as she brings her talent back to their silly little game. Her green eyes mirror the swells of her excited smile, and what she forms is a clean-cut, rounded heart.

She slides it over to his silent self. He raises an eyebrow at her, partially questioning, and partially losing all credibility by internally panicking.

"You're finally quiet," she comments, lightly giggling behind that pretty smile, and he has to agree. So he says jestingly, "A heart's too simple. You can do better than that."

"I probably can…" She turns considerate, putting her fingers to her lips and lightly tapping them. Rapunzel seems to be steadily contemplating something, before another squirm wriggles its way up her spine and at its end, she leans up to press a chaste kiss to his cheek. "There."

When she gets off of her toes again, she gives another imploring push to the mug. He smiles crookedly at her, trying to keep himself from saying something stupid.

"You didn't need have to work that hard to impress me, anyways," Rapunzel says brightly.

"No, I did," he says, gazing down at her, "That idiocy's what got you here."

At that, she laughs and leans across him to get yet another mug from the rack. She silently asks for him to fill it up, and with a new sense of stupid giddiness, he does so.

She points lightly at the mug with the heart in it, which has miraculously lasted in a vague blur of its previous shape. Her smile is timid but she lightly nudges at his ankle, her voice thoughtful, "That's not the last thing I have to say, either."


End file.
